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NYPD Rape Trial: Accuser Testifies Through Tears

April 15, 2011

A woman who says she was sexually assaulted by NYPD officer Kenneth Moreno while his partner, Franklin Mata, stood watch, testified yesterday in State Supreme Court. “I was so intoxicated I couldn’t say or do anything,” the woman said on the stand. Prosecutors allege that the officers were called to take the woman home after a cab driver called the police, but security cameras reveal them entering her apartment four separate times, possibly as part of a cover-up. “Most jurors looked down as the woman told her story,” the New York Times reports.

Though her memories come in and out — she had been drinking heavily in Park Slope — the East Village woman, who has since moved to California, says she remembers “the rustling of clothing and very loud Velcro ripping,” which prosecutors allege was the removal of a bullet-proof vest.

The woman had trouble getting through her testimony, but when she did it was horrifying, as she described passing out while being raped:

When she woke up, still face down, she felt a man’s presence, “and he’s actually in my bed to my left,” she said.

“He was talking to me,” she said. “He said something to the effect of, ‘Do you want me to stay?'”

She did not respond, she said, and the man kissed her on her shoulder.

She passed out again, she said. She woke up in her dark bedroom to the sound of two men speaking at the foot of her bed, she said.

As we’ve noted before, the woman’s case rests not on physical evidence, but on a secret recording she took days later in which Officer Moreno denied raping her, but eventually admitted that he wore a condom.

“I couldn’t believe that two police officers who had been called there to help me had instead raped me and left me face down in a pool of vomit in my bed to die,” the woman testified. Defense lawyers will continue their cross examination today.